CHAPTER III.

ANCIENT AND MODERN IDEAS OF REVELATION.— ITS SOURCES AND AGENCIES.

Though the true meaning of a revelation is simply a disclosure this obviously simple word has long been one to conjure with, and it is still to-day a veritable storm-center wherever theological matters are discussed.

Scientifically, however, the word presents no difficulties, for in scientific circles it is always used as the synonym of discovery. We may truly say that we receive a revelation of the heavens when we gaze through telescopes into the midnight skies and trace the process of the constellations, but no one imagines for an instant that the stars are deliberately showing themselves to astronomers and hiding their faces from all other persons. But it remains a fact that certain astronomers actually see far more of the heavenly bodies than is beheld by the general bulk of any population.

Let us apply this simple illustration to those great seers or prophets, who may well be termed the spiritual star-gazers of our race. Such men and women are figuratively represented as climbing to the tops of mountains, and delving into caves of the earth and clefts of rocks, just as astronomers and geologists literally ascend mountain eminences, and dive into the depths of the crust of the planet, that they may in the one case have a wider view of the sky and in the other a better opportunity to examine the layers or strata of the globe. We know quite well that certain places are particularly favorable for astronomical observations; among these deep wells have always occupied a foremost place, for we can see the stars at midday if we descend into a well and at night-time we can only have a wide sweep of the heavens if we plant our observatories on lofty heights. Natural similitudes have always been employed by bards or psalmists to describe their realization of the nearness of the spiritual universe, which does indeed interpenetrate as well as encircle all material orbs. The nineteenth psalm, and some majestic portions of the Book of Job, won the admiration of Thomas Paine, who quotes some splendid passages in his “Age of Reason,” in which much controverted volume he levels biting sarcasm at many other portions of the Bible, which he deems entirely inconsistent with the glorious conception of the Supreme Being set forth in the quotations he admires. “The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament showeth his handiwork,” is a superb tribute to its author's sublime idea of Nature, and yet more does it testify to his realization of human ability to scan the heavens and read, in their outspread beauties, the caligraphy of the Almighty. The cattle in the fields are just as near the sky as the shepherd who is tending his flocks on the same pasture ground, but we have no reason to suppose that sheep or oxen contemplate the heavens as did the shepherd king of ancient Israel, and we have no ground for surmising that even the average human traveler who ascends to the summit of some lofty peak has anything like the same idea of the starlit skies as those Magi or Wise Men of ancient Persia or Chaldea, who are said to have discovered the Star of Bethlehem at the time of the birth of Jesus. Every age has had, and the present undoubtedly has, its particularly earnest and qualified inspectors of the widely open book of natural revelation, which is never for an instant closed except in the face of ignorance and indifference. Were we all equally open-eyed and open-minded we should all receive an equal revelation, for Nature holds no secrets shut away from some, which are purposely revealed to others. Who, let us ask, were those prophets of old, who saw and heard so much more of the ways of Deity than did the hosts of their contemporaries, to whom they always appear as almost unfathomable enigmas, strange beings like “super-men,” to be either blindly venerated or ruthlessly persecuted, according to the temper of those among whom they mingled. These mystic visionaries, and stalwart champions of righteousness, have ever been the glory of the lands on which they have set foot, and their record is handed down through successive centuries and milleniums as bearing special witness to divine interposition in the ordinary affairs of men. But science, perhaps, will not allow us to use that word interposition, seeing that it gives color to a belief very much at variance with general scientific reasoning; let us then interpret the history of those romantic dwellers on the borders of the unseen universe in reasonable terms, easily understood by all who are diligently seeking to show that unity exists between the physical and superphysical at all times. We may well afford to discard the adjective “supernatural,” unless we give it a significance quite at variance with much that passes for theology. There are higher and lower planes of nature; thus it is not incorrect to call some super and others sub, when we are comparing them with a general average level of human intellectual attainment, which claims to have a certain amount of acquaintance with a very limited portion of Nature, but freely speculates regarding other realms, which are beyond the scrutiny of ordinary observations. There is nothing unscientific, and certainly nothing irrational, in lending a willing ear to the testimony of the ages on behalf of spiritual revelation, provided we always admit that what was possible in the past is equally possible to-day, and that however strange to us certain phenomena may seem, we have no ground for supposing that because they are (to us) mysterious, they are not as much in harmony with the operation of undeviating law as the erratic movements of a celestial visitor like Halley's Comet, which comes to visit our skies only about once in every seventy-five years, instead of appearing regularly in the heavens like those familiar planets Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Mars and Saturn, who are old friends to every one of us. Whatever we are accustomed to regularly behold we are quite certain to call natural, but anything unusual or previously unknown to us we are apt to dub supernatural, thereby exposing a strange, but familiar, combination of ignorance and self-conceit. What right have we to claim to so far know the limits of the natural as either to deny the possibility of some curious phenomenon or else rashly attribute it to some miraculous intervention of divine providence, as though God changed or suspended universal order every time we encounter something we are not wise enough to explain? The growing thought of to-day in cultured circles is drifting ever further and further away from atheism, and from supernaturalism also, and is coming to a reasonable conclusion that the unseen universe has never been entirely invisible to the whole of humanity, though very few apparently have anywhere at any time penetrated to any large extent into its mysterious depths. The honored names of Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge, and many other distinguished modern scientists immediately summon forth the idea of fearless and industrious seekers after truth coupling psychical research with general mundane occupations. These good and great men, and many others associated with them, have during many years of indefatigable investigation accumulated an enormous quantity of facts which have already gone immensely far to dispel the clouds of superstition and negation which still, to some extent, obscure the public intellect, even in Great Britain and America where intellectual progress has supposedly reached a very noble pitch. Soon after the breaking forth of the movement known as Modern Spiritualism in America, in 1848, a large number of highly distinguished men of light and leading in various communities undertook a searching investigation of the claims of the new cult, which from its inception has always embodied within itself the most curiously heterogeneous elements. Among distinguished authors on both sides the Atlantic a foremost place is deservedly given to William Howitt, whose compendious work, “The History of The Supernatural in all Ages and Nations, and in all Churches, Christian and Pagan, demonstrating a universal faith” may well be styled a monumental tribute to ripe painstaking scholarship. In this great work, issued in two large volumes both in England and America, we have an account of spiritual manifestations of the most widely diversified character, ranging from the truly angelic to the distinctively diabolical, and as the author was one of the best known scholars of his day, and a man who wrote much of the best standard educational literature published in Great Britain during the middle of the Nineteenth Century, his testimony cannot be lightly brushed aside; nor can we justifiably ignore the works of those famous Americans, Mapes and Hare, or the writings of Judge Edmonds and many other equally well known and highly reliable members of the learned professions, all of whom from a worldly standpoint risked much, but could gain nothing, by giving their endorsement to the genuineness of marvels which were rudely scouted, not only by the ordinary people but by the great majority of college professors and graduates who would not condescend to seriously investigate them. No one doubts that a vast amount of fraud has been introduced in the name of Spiritualism, and we cannot close our eyes to the fact that many honest people are sometimes subject to hallucinations, but there is unmistakably a large residuum of fact which conclusively proves the existence of a spiritual life in humanity which far transcends all materialistic theories of human origin and destiny. Prof. Alfred Russel Wallace,—himself an earnest Spiritualist as well as a world-renowned Naturalist—has sometimes expressed his opinion that our humanity to-day does not essentially differ from the humanity expressed on earth during the Stone Age or some other remote geological period. If this be a fact, and we see no reason to dispute it, we can very readily understand how it has come to pass that we find ourselves to-day invited to share experiences common to ancient nations and individuals who have left behind them extraordinary testimonies to the commingling, to some extent at least, of discarnate spiritual entities with physically embodied humanity. Without presuming to deny the existence of multitudinous orders of intelligences in the Universe belonging to very different planets and systems than our own, we have certainly the right, and it is indeed our imperative scientific duty, to weigh the alleged evidence brought forward in fancied support of the oft-repeated allegation that the Angels of light, and also the Demons of darkness, constantly referred to in our Bible, and in a multitude of other venerated Scriptures, belong to other orders in Creation than ourselves. It seems almost unaccountable, in the face of the Biblical record itself, that anyone should ever have imagined that the authors of the text ever had in mind the appearance on earth as Angels, of beings of any other Order than ourselves, for the narrators always describe celestial visitors as men, or at any rate as human, for there is no definite allusion to sex in any original. The masculine and plural genders are very much confused in English versions of Hebrew Scriptures, and this is often due to the fact that a great many Hebrew words fail to give any idea that one sex rather than the other is indicated. Nothing but senseless bigotry and old-fogeyism can have led ecclesiastical commissioners to reject statues representing angels, as occurred at one time in New York, because the sculptor had chiseled some of them in male and others in female shape, and for educated Christians to take so ridiculous a stand would be quite incomprehensible were it not for our painful familiarity with the strenuous endeavors of intolerant males in many ages to consign their mothers and sisters to comparative oblivion while they filled all important offices themselves and derived their adequate support very largely indeed from the work and income of the female members of their flocks. A very old and powerful weapon is wrested from the grasp of masculine ecclesiastical monopolists immediately we prove to the world that the very authority on which they have relied to sustain their fictitious claims is actually against them. People have a perfect right to openly dispute the doctrine of Biblical authority, but there can be no fair play if we misrepresent the teachings of any documents and then base our own dogmas on such misrepresentation. The first chapter of Genesis emphatically declares that original Humanity is equally male and female. There can be but two intelligible explanations of this fact, viz., the ancient belief, still entertained by many Mystics, that human beings were originally super-sexual, sex differentiation only beginning with some departure from an original condition, and the much simpler view, which we can all appreciate without plunging into any deep waters of Mysticism, that whenever and wherever human life first made its appearance on this planet males and females were existent side by side on terms of complete equality. Who then are the Bible angels who so frequently appeared to patriarchal families of old? Young men, in our English text, they frequently are called, and so perfectly human in all their attributes did they appear that frequently we are told the inhabitants of cities in which they manifested mistook them for ordinary travelers,— a circumstance which once for all disposes of the claim that they were something other than human, or that they appeared in any startling, because unfamiliar, guise We have no justifiable reason for deciding that all the Biblical Angels were even human spiritual entities disrobed of flesh; it is quite rational to maintain that the word “angel” is often used to designate a messenger from some Spiritual Order, one who merely held high rank as a teacher or ambassador and who was entrusted with some particular commission to a special place and people. There seems good reason for admitting the contention of Edward Irving,—founder of the body of Christians styling itself Catholic Apostolic Church,—that the primitive Christian Church acknowledged four Orders of Ministers, the highest of which was termed Angels. This doctrine proclaimed successfully in the Nineteenth century, first in Great Britain, and then in several other lands, by the intrepid Irving and his devoted followers, derived much sanction from the opening chapters of the Apocalypse, which speaks of the message of the Spirit being sent to the Angels of the Seven Churches of Asia, the plain inference being that the overseers thus designated must have held a rank similar to that of bishops in many Christian communities to-day. It seems, however, certain that though the simplest definition of angel is, broadly speaking, messenger, ancient Scriptures give us frequently to understand that beings ordinarily unseen occasionally made their appearance in materialized form, and when they did so they were not generally distinguishable from ordinary human beings. Whenever we are led to suppose that they were seen by common vision we may rationally suppose that they were actually young Initiates into the Temple Mysteries of antiquity, commissioned by the Heads of the Orders to act as ambassadors or intermediaries. This very simple commentary on some, otherwise highly mysterious, portions of the Bible text explains lucidly and simply the oft-repeated title “Angel of the Lord,” which occurs with great frequency, and though it may come as a decided shock to Bible-worshipers to be offered so simple a commentary, even the most orthodox of such,—if in any way connected with one or other of the sacerdotal Churches,—will soon begin to see that if such were the case in days of old, this fact only bears witness to the antiquity and continuity of a priestly system, and priesthoods are, as we all well know, much more ancient than either Christianity or Judaism. According to the ideas we are now expressing, we must take into exact account the original meaning of terms and titles variously translated GOD; the Lord God; the Lord; and the Angel of the Lord. These designatory titles are by no means correctly interchangeable, and the fact that they have been so largely regarded as synonymous has led to an immense amount of bewildering and acrimonious controversy. We can scarcely believe that any man, woman, youth or maiden, possessed of ordinary intelligence and fairly well acquainted with the English language, would ever imagine that these four plainly distinctive titles were used as synonyms originally, any more than one is inclined to believe, when reading general history, that an envoy is the monarch whose commissions he has been appointed to fulfil. Every student of Kabbalistic literature knows thoroughly well that the oldest Hebrew documents treat largely of various Orders of Intelligences who execute Divine commissions and take actively influential parts in directing the affairs of Earth. No one can read a modern Jewish Prayer Book, belonging to the orthodox or conservative school, without finding frequent mention of several Celestial Hierarchies, in accordance with very ancient terminology. For example, we will turn to the standard popular orthodox Jewish Prayer Book in use throughout the British Empire, and to a considerable extent also in the United States. In the course of the Morning Service for Sabbaths and Festivals, occur the following majestic words, which are verily a beautiful link between the more prosaic present and the richly-storied and imaginative past: “Be thou blessed, O our Rock, our King and Redeemer, Creator of holy beings. Praised be thy name for ever, O our King; Creator of ministering spirits, all of whom stand in the heights of the universe and proclaim with awe in unison aloud the words of the living God and everlasting King. All of them are beloved, pure and mighty, and all of them in dread and awe do the will of their Master; and all of them open their mouths in holiness and purity, with song and psalm, while they bless and praise, glorify and reverence, sanctify and ascribe sovereignty to the name of the Divine King, the great, mighty and dreaded One, holy is he; and they all take upon themselves the yoke of the kingdom of heaven one from the other, and give sanction to one another to hallow their Creator; in tranquil joy of spirit, with pure speech and holy melody they all respond in unison, and exclaim with awe; Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory; and the Ophanim and the holy Chayoth with a noise of great rushing, upraising themselves towards the Seraphim, thus over against them offer praise and say Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place.”

The above quotation, which would find no exact parallel in any Prayer Book compiled by Rabbis of the Reform school, is an interesting survival, both in sentiment and language, of very ancient Jewish thought, tho’ we would presume to suggest that improvements in the English version would in no way obscure the meaning of the Hebrew original, which still remains the unrivaled tongue of orthodox Israelitish worship. Such a word as “dread” finds a better substitute in “reverence,” and it is highly important to keep this thought in mind when we undertake to criticize the Bible texts, from the sublime imagery of which such utterances have been collated. Ezekiel’s visions are responsible for such passages as the one just cited, and it is, of course, very largely open to conjecture how far it was formerly believed in Israel that these visions were actually revelations of life in the Spiritual Universe, and how far the language was designedly symbolical. But however much room there may be for controversy in this particular regard, no doubt whatever can exist in the minds of those who have made themselves familiar with the records of antiquity, that the Jews, in common with all other historic peoples, had firm confidence in the real existence of unnumbered legions of spiritual companies, who were often called the Legions of the Skies. It has remained for Le Plongeon, and a few other indefatigable modern investigators in the Western Hemisphere to prove conclusively the enormous antiquity of similar convictions in Western as well as Eastern lands. Though at first sight it may appear to unreflecting minds that there is little else than primitive superstition in these allusions to manifold Orders of spiritual existences, it surely requires but a very little intelligent meditation on the scientifically revealed arrangement of the universe to put to flight so vapid a conclusion. Harmony is everywhere self-evidently displayed in the systematic organization of solar systems which stud the immensities of infinitude, and in all the myriad systems of worlds discovered through the piercing eye of the most far-reaching telescopes, we find no two globes exactly similar tho’ all are constructed of a single primary substance and all revolve with such perfect regularity that astronomers know exactly when to expect the reappearance of even the remotest star in the gigantic aggregation of constellations which make up our universe. This indisputable natural revelation well comports with all that we are accustomed to call Natural Religion, and when it is fairly weighed it serves to explain, without denying the primal basis of Revealed Religion, because when both are rightly understood one dovetails into the other. Natural Religionists invariably claim that they derive all their ideas from a contemplation of natural phenomena without the interposition of any priests or angels, but they who make this claim to possess more information than the majority of their fellows are simply placing themselves in the ranks of what may well be called a scientific priesthood, and nothing is more self-evident than that avowed Rationalists place extreme reliance upon the authority of great names and point to scientific discoveries with immense satisfaction, though they were made by others than themselves.

There is very little difference at core between this attitude and that of the most confirmed Theosophists, for the latter only claim that their authorities are peculiarly endowed individuals whom they term the Elder Brethren of our race. Recent Theosophical publications are far less difficult to read and understand than are the older writings of the Alchemistical Philosophers, who had a double object for concealing the inner meaning of their teaching within a cloak of hieroglyphical symbology. The “jargon of the Mystics,” as this allegorical method has been vulgarly termed, was rendered necessary during the Middle Ages in Europe on account of the ignorant fanaticism then and there prevailing, for without the employment of a mystic glyph there would have been no safety for the writers and also no means of communication between fellow students of the Mysteries. We glibly speak of the great discoveries made by Bruno, Galileo, Herschel, Newton, Kepler, and many other highly endowed men who lived but a few centuries ago, and we praise them none too highly when we pay glowing tributes to their research and industry; but there is no valid reason for continuing to assert that the heliocentric system of astronomy was not known long ages before modern Europe was a home of learning. We are far too apt to claim some monopoly for discovery or revelation, which always covers a much larger area than can be bounded by any special time or place. We ought now to be ready to recast our theories concerning the spread of religious ideas and practices, many of which may have sprung up simultaneously in different parts of the world instead of having been borrowed by one nation from another.

Astronomers in their observatories need not make each other’s acquaintance, or even know of each other’s existence, to make similar observations of celestial phenomena, for it is quite possible that different men in various places at the same time may be turning their eyes to the heavens and watching the same celestial panorama.

The Egyptian and Indo-Germanic theories of the transit of religions and languages have often been pitted against each other as rival candidates for universal acceptance, but as the Atlantian theory is very much older than either, we may find in it a very fair solution of many difficult problems which a less universal theory of origins will fail to supply. The kings and queens of very ancient days may have indeed ruled by that divine right of individual qualification for supremacy without which all nominal rulership is the next thing to a farce. The Gods and Goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome are now often looked upon as glorified rulers of Atlantis, whose memory had been handed down with ever increasing glorification, just as we are prone to glorify our national heroes and heroines until from a basis in actual history we construct mental images of almost divine personages whose anniversaries we celebrate as public holidays and whose memories we extol so highly that many of them shortly become saints and even demigods in our esteem. When we read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey we are at once impressed with the very earthly attributes assigned by that great poet to the divinities of the Pantheon. Such beings as are therein described are so entirely human in all their feelings and conduct that we can well believe that their idealized existence in the Empyrean was founded on records of their actual life on earth, a conclusion easily reached by all who know how firm a hold ancestor worship has held and still holds upon the hearts and minds of multitudes. There is much more that is historical, and consequently much less that is fabulous, in the views of Mythologists than many of us have been brought up to believe, for we are now experiencing a reaction in thought from the extremely materialistic views which for many centuries held undisputed sway in nearly every Western seat of learning. So dense has been the darkness in which college professors were engulfed where the Classics were concerned, and so relentless was the prejudice against Oriental religions, that in every European university students were taught to believe that there was no truth whatever in the religious concepts of even the most illustrious Pagans, apart from some concession being made to the excellence of a portion of their moral philosophy. Now it is becoming the fashion to treat the pagan divinities very much as we treat the Christian saints, who were certainly human beings with an actual earthly career, though it is very doubtful whether such narratives as we find in the “Lives of the Saints” published with ecclesiastical sanction, could in all cases be verified by historic scrutiny. Our own contemporaries may be, some of them at least, quite as intelligent and also quite as saintly as their greatly revered progenitors, but as distance always lends enchantment to a view, we are rarely if ever anything like so ready to canonize those who are living among us as those who have long since departed from this mortal state. There are, however, four distinct elements in mythology without due regard to which we are unable to make much progress in Biblical and Occult research. These are, first, Astronomical and Astrological; second, Historical and Biographical; third, Spiritualistic and Idealistic; fourth, Esoteric and Intuitive. We can read any ancient story in the light of this fourfold method of interpretation without doing violence to reason or good judgment, for we must always remember that there were no cheap printing presses in days of old or in Classic lands making it easy for every item of unimportant information to be recorded in a daily paper. Scribes in olden times were exceptionally capable people and the art of writing was looked upon as sacred, therefore, only the very important events in the life of the people would be permanently recorded, and that portion of their literature which would be produced on well-nigh imperishable tablets would be the work of those exceptionally learned ones to whom was entrusted the custody of those affairs which were generally esteemed as of the highest moment. Trivial incidents are often mentioned but not for their own sake, only for the purpose of illustrating important teachings which the wise men gave to their students through the agency of a double cipher, which enabled those who were in the inner ring of the students’ conclave to ascertain the teachers’ esoteric meaning, while all outside that consecrated circle would only hear of common-place events of no exceptional significance. When this fact is thoroughly digested and we consider the parabolic teaching still universal in the East, our examination of ancient records will become both edifying and fascinating and we shall be able to escape the Scylla of unreasoning scepticism and also the Charybdis of blind unquestioning belief in the Divine authority of all that any record holds.